1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to integrated circuits. More specifically, it relates to a circuit for measuring power integrity of a chip containing integrated circuits.
2. Description of Prior Art
As greater numbers of components are integrated onto semiconductor chips, the quality of the power supplies on those chips becomes an issue for chip designers. A poorly designed power supply architecture can lead to devices failing in operation due to problems such as, e.g., ground bounce and power droop.
Ground bounce is a transient parasitic phenomenon that occurs in high-speed devices and is caused in part by device packaging. When several I/O pins are switched simultaneously at high slew rates (which is, of course, common when driving a bus), the sum of the driving currents through each I/O pin can be quite substantial. The problem arises because this large current must be returned through the ground pins on the device. When there are many fewer ground pins than driving I/O pins, each ground pin is conducting a large portion of the return current. This current can become large enough to induce a significant voltage across the ground pins' lead inductances. This raises the ground reference voltage, which leads to decreased noise margins at receiving modules. Lowered noise margins can result in logic values being sensed improperly, a fatal communications error.
Power droop is experienced when large numbers of logic elements switch at the same time (for example, when the main system clock switches) in that they all draw current from the power supply. Since the wires that connect the circuits to the power supply are not ideal and have resistance, capacitance and inductance, a sudden demand for current will lead to a voltage drop across these wires. The inductance of the wire causes a voltage loss related to the rate of change of current demand. A clock switching causing a sudden large current demand causes a sudden voltage drop to occur across the power supply lines on the chip. Thus, each element that is trying to switch sees an apparent drop in it's supply voltage; this is commonly referred to as “power droop.”
To compound this problem, the failures are likely to be caused by dynamic effects and may not be detectable at final test which is usually performed at a much lower frequency than the typical operating frequency of the device.
During the design phase, power analysis programs can be used to evaluate the power consumption of the chip. These programs can be used to verify the power droop through different branches of the power supply network and show “hot spots” where the conductors may be too narrow for the predicted current flow. Unfortunately, these tools are only as good as the models they use and, to improve their speed of operation, the models use a simplified view of the operating environment. This simplification leads to a reduction in accuracy of the results which is sometimes unacceptable. Furthermore, these tools do not consider packaging and board level details, both of which can have significant effects on the power supply quality.
In addition to power analysis programs, there are currently two ways of measuring the voltages in a wire of an operating integrated circuit: directly with a microprobe or indirectly with something like an electron microscope. The indirect methods tend to suffer from the fact that they cannot resolve very fast edge rates and are very expensive. The direct method is reasonably cheap and can cope with moderate edge rates. Unfortunately, it is very time consuming, hard to automate and wastes die area with probe pad landing sites. It also suffers from the problem that performing the measurement disturbs the circuit that is being measured. It is, thus, desirable to have a method of measuring on-chip power supplies of real working silicon at real working frequencies.